Lionheart (5 page)
Authors: Douglas Boyd
At Westminster, Eleanor found herself responsible for raising not only her own young sons but also Henry’s bastard Geoffrey by his Saxon mistress Ykenai until he was old enough to be sent off to be educated for high ecclesiastical office in the schools of Northampton. That old gossip Walter Map spitefully labelled Geoffrey’s mother
meretrix
– a prostitute
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– but Henry’s paranoia would never have let him take an interest in a mistress’ child of doubtful paternity.
There was little privacy in the modern sense of the word, whether at Westminster or on the road with Henry. It was then thought aberrant to wish to be alone – except in hermits, among whom it was considered a sign of their piety. The court when travelling slept in one great hall, with a solar at one end, so that all could see who was with whom and why. In September Eleanor moved to Winchester, which had been the capital of Saxon England, while Henry took time off to hunt in the nearby New Forest where, as in all the forests, it was forbidden for the hungry Anglo-Saxon inhabitants to seek food or even collect firewood.
By the Christmas court of 1155, held at Winchester, Eleanor was pregnant again and shortly to be abandoned by Henry when he crossed to France to placate Louis Capet and declare a brief war on his brother Geoffrey for daring to claim that an oath sworn by Henry on their father’s deathbed should be honoured, giving him territory of his own to govern. While Eleanor held no writ of regency, that did not stop her travelling the country in great pomp and style, furnishing her temporary lodgings with tapestries and favourite furniture, issuing charters over her own seal and arranging marriages that ensured the spouses owed her loyalty. In June she was back at Winchester for the birth of a daughter, christened Matilda in honour of her formidable grandmother, an event closely followed by the death of Prince William.
She lost little time in grieving, travelling to France to be present when Henry was in her lands. The cartulary of the important abbey of La Sauve, lying east of Bordeaux, records their visit with a glittering retinue that included ‘Thomas of London’
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who constantly had Henry’s ear. So busy was Henry with punishing anyone who flouted his ducal authority, and razing their fortifications when the mood took him, that it was rumoured his speed in operations must be due to his use of widespread treachery. At some point in their separate progresses back to the North, Eleanor must have met up with her husband, for she was pregnant again when she returned to England in February 1157 – this time with the son who would be her favourite.
N
OTES
1.
Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 114.
2.
Ibid, p. 113.
3.
For a fuller account of Eleanor’s court, see Boyd,
Eleanor
, pp. 137–9.
4.
Also sometimes called Bernard de Ventadour.
5.
Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 116.
6.
A mark was equivalent to one-third of an English pound.
7.
Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 116.
8.
For greater detail see Boyd,
Eleanor
, p. 136.
9.
William fitz Stephen,
Life of Becket
, ed. J.C. Robertson, Rolls Series No 67 (London: Longmans, 1875), Vol 3, p. 17.
10.
Map,
De Nugis
, pp. 238, 246. His phrase
meretrix quedam publica
more likely expresses Anglo-Norman contempt for an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman.
11.
C. de la Ville,
Histoire de l’Abbaye de La Sauve Majeure
(Paris: Mequignon junior and Bordeaux: Th. Lafargue, 1877), p. 177.
3
T
his, then, was the turbulent Plantagenet family into which Richard was born at the palace outside Oxford. The name of the dynasty founded by Henry and Eleanor is said to come from Richard’s grandfather Geoffrey the Fair, who wore a sprig of
planta genista
or bright yellow broom –
genêt
in French – in his helmet to make him instantly recognisable in fast-moving equestrian combat.
When the royal family was gathered together for a Christmas or Easter court the sibling rivalry and tensions must have made life hellish for the four princes and three princesses, not least because their father had inherited from his Norse ancestors a tendency to go berserk when angry or thwarted. He would then fall down in a fit, foaming at the mouth and rending his clothes in fury to roll among the rotten reeds that covered the flagstones of whichever palace they were in – reeds that, if not freshly laid, were fouled with food scraps and the excrement of dogs and other animals.
Even family members mysteriously came and went, adding to the children’s insecurity. Before Richard’s fifth birthday, his elder brother Henry was sent to continue his education in the London house of Chancellor Thomas Becket. This sending away of noble sons to be brought up in another household was not unusual at the time, but Princess Matilda was also sent away young – to Germany when only 12, having long been betrothed by her father to Duke Henry of Saxony, known as Henry the Lion. There were also additions to the royal family. Henry II’s obsession with alliances would lead him to inveigle Eleanor’s first husband Louis VII of France to hand over two daughters by his second wife: Princess Marguerite was betrothed to Prince Henry and Princess Alais was betrothed at the age of 9 to Richard, who had previously been betrothed after the Christmas court of 1158, when he was only seventeen months old, to Berengaria – a daughter of the count of Barcelona, not to be confused with Berengaria of Navarre, to whom he was later married by Eleanor’s wiles during the Third Crusade. For similar political reasons, Alix of Maurienne was betrothed in infancy to Prince John and Constance of Brittany was betrothed to Prince Geoffrey.
Marriage was a political tool, as when, in October 1160, Richard’s father stole a march on Louis VII. He ordered Eleanor to bring Prince Henry from England to Normandy and thence to do homage to Louis for the duchy of Normandy. With the connivance of certain papal legates, he then had Prince Henry married in Neubourg to Louis’ daughter Princess Marguerite. The groom was aged 7 and the bride a mere 3 years old, so this was in direct breach of the agreement made two years before with Louis: that the marriage would be effected when she reached puberty. The purpose of the marriage was simply to secure Marguerite’s dowry, which included the strategically important castle of Gisors, on the borders of Normandy and Louis’ domains, and two other important castles.
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Work was immediately put in hand to strengthen the fortifications at Gisors, with moats deepened and a new curtain wall running around the castle for 800 metres, protected by eight new towers.
All these young people and still others were treated as Richard’s brothers and sisters by other members of the court. Life became even more complicated when statuses changed, as when Richard’s second betrothed, Princess Alais Capet, caught King Henry’s roving eye while she was still a young teenager and was forced to become one of his mistresses.
The royal family had many fortified residences but no fixed home. In those times, kings and the nobility had to be mobile in order to keep their restless vassals frightened into obedience and shows of loyalty, as well as paying up the latest tax demands. The court or
curia
was, then, not a place, but consisted of the king and his courtiers, wherever they might be at a given time, and Henry II’s court was even more peripatetic than most. When on the road, its members never knew where they would be sleeping in two nights’ time. They were likened by Peter of Blois, who served as Queen Eleanor’s secretary and therefore knew Henry’s habits well, to the
milites Herlewini
– soldiers in the army of the mythical English King Herla, who ‘in endless wandering makes mad marches without stay or rest’, any man who dared to fall out of the ranks being ‘turned to dust’.
2
The simile was apt because no courtier could afford to be elsewhere when summoned by the king at any hour of the day or night, for those whom Henry had raised high could easily be cast down for a simple misdemeanour or brief absence from the court – the social equivalent of being turned to dust.
Another
curialis
or courtier was Walter Map, who wrote in his work
Courtiers’ Gossip
, ‘Saint Augustine said, “I am in time and I speak of time, and yet do not know what time is.” Similarly I am in the court and I speak of the court, yet do not know what it is.’
3
As though to confuse all his retinue, Henry II would frequently announce an early start next day and then remain in bed, alone or not, until noon. This left the entire retinue of 100 or more men and women dozing beside their harnessed mounts and draught animals since before dawn. Or, he might declare the next day a rest day and then change his mind, to rise early and depart with a small bodyguard in a cloud of dust, leaving scores of riders and wagon-drivers and passengers to perform their toilet and ready themselves in panic, harnessing their animals and following as best they could. Commenting on this, Peter of Blois recorded that the king’s latest travel plans were most easily found by ‘running to the court whores, for this breed of courtier often knows the palace secrets’.
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When travelling to the various family gatherings, such as Christmas and Easter courts, Richard and the other princes and princesses too young to ride a horse were transported, wrapped in furs, with their nurses, inside lumbering barrel-roofed wooden ox-carts with leather curtains that protected them from the rain or cold. These took their place in an expanded retinue of 200-plus guards, courtiers, clerks, household servants, prelates serving as ambassadors in the hope of catching the king’s ear, plus merchants and other assorted hangers-on – all of whom literally fought for sleeping space at overnight stops after the best accommodation had been taken by the royal family. The tumultuous life of Henry’s court reflected the cataclysmic coming together of Richard’s equally strong-willed parents, whose relationship was always turbulent.
When one enters a medieval castle today, the courtyard of the keep is usually empty except for a few other visitors. Not so in Richard’s time: as wall plates projecting from the inner walls of the
corps de logis
often testify, lean-tos of one, two and three storeys were erected, taking up much of the space in the courtyard. The din of human voices, horses neighing and dogs barking, the clatter of hooves and clang of wheel rims, plus the hammering of armourers, farriers, wheelwrights and other craftsmen, and all the comings and goings of the court bounced off the stone walls in a ceaseless cacophony, harder on the medieval ear than in modern times when even remote areas of countryside in developed countries are rarely without the noise of road traffic, agricultural machines or aircraft that has raised our aural threshold significantly. With only the privileged able to avail themselves of the long-drop toilets, the stench of human excrement that had to be carried in pots and wooden tubs out of the keep each morning and of the animal dung that had to be removed must have made anyone with a sense of smell long to be on the road again, breathing fresh air.
It is possible that Richard found the ceaseless travel and confusion of the court harder to bear than his siblings did. Whether to protect him or for some emotional reason, Eleanor decided early in his childhood to keep him close to her as much as possible, ensuring that he was raised as a future duke of Aquitaine, to become a warrior-poet like her grandfather Duke William IX.
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Known as William the Troubadour, the latter had famously defied the Church in warfare, treating his vassals in holy orders exactly like all the others and flaunting in public his mistress, known as La Dangerosa and La Maubergeonne. After his second wife retired to a nunnery where his first wife already lived, William bore his mistress’ nude portrait on his shield – in return, so he said, for her bearing him in bed. To ensure there was no doubt what that meant, he summed up the situation in his poem
Un vers convinent
in terms that every fellow knight would understand:
